|
|
|
Only 210 More Days... I don’t know about the rest of you, but I am eagerly anticipating next summer’s condo climbing trip. In the next six months I’ll be your "tour guide", filling you in on trip information and hopefully some other interesting tidbits along the way. The Group: Last fall, Rick and I hoped we could find 12 people to take on Colorado’s highest. This task turned out to be much less difficult than I thought, so our group has grown a little. Here’s the contingent:
I’m quite certain that nobody in this group knows everybody else. That should make things interesting. So how do we fit 16 people in a 12-person condo? At first we thought about sleeping people on the floor (which is still a possibility) but, as luck would have it, there is another 12-person condo across the street. We’ve decided to open up the invitations again with the hopes of filling both condos. There are a few potential problems having a group larger than some Himalayan expeditions, but it’s hard to turn away people who want to do some serious work on the 14ers. So if you know somebody who wants to join the group, please have them contact Rick Stinchfield ( rick.stinchfield@uni.edu or 273-7357).The When: We will be able to move into the condo on the afternoon of Friday, August 4th and we can stay through Sunday, August 13th. That gives us 8 full days inbetween to climb and add to the economy of Breckenridge, Colorado. The Short Story: I know quite a few of the people going on this trip, but I thought I’d take this opportunity to let everyone know a little bit about me. Hopefully some of the rest of you will volunteer some information about yourselves and by the time we get to Colorado we’ll already know at least a little about each other. So, let’s get on with the story... I’m Raymond Johnson and I’m a graduate geography student at UNI. I just graduated last December with a BA in mathematics. Yes, I realize that geography is different from mathematics, but it’s time for something new. My first wilderness trips were canoe trips in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters in 1993, ‘94, and ‘95. In 1998 I took my first backpacking trip, a pretty grueling 5-day pack on the Superior Hiking Trail along Lake Superior. Later that summer I took a backpacking trip with a group of UNI Presidential Scholars for a class taught by Dr. Stinchfield. On that trip I climbed my first two mountains, Eagle Cap in Oregon and Mt. Belford in Colorado. Ever since that trip I’ve been totally hooked on mountaineering. I even read "Mountaineering: Freedom of the Hills" cover-to-cover. I consider it my biggest achievement in mountaineering, and those of you who have seen the book might understand why. Last summer I accompanied the Stinchfields and some UNI faculty on a "capstone" trip where Rick and I climbed Mt. Harvard, the 3rd highest peak in Colorado, a peak that had eluded me the year before. For my "scrapbooks" of some of my trips, see my web page at http://www.math.uni.edu/~johnso60.Here are some other miscellaneous facts about me: I’m a Cubs fan, I’m a computer nerd, my hometown is Iowa Falls, I’ve been struck by lightning (only once and it wasn’t a direct hit but is a great story), I’m a big fan of stand-up comedy, I check my email at least 4,982 times a day (give or take about 4,900), and I’ve won enough money playing trivia with Rick that I had to turn professional and am therefore not eligible for the Trivia Olympics. If there’s anything else you wish to know, just ask. The Rest: I can go on and on when it comes to mountaineering and this upcoming trip, but I’ll save that for the weeks to come. We’ll cover transportation, fitness, the effects of altitude, trends in mountaineering, the merits of "peak-bagging", the mountains we might want to climb, and all sorts of other things. If there is anything about the trip that people want to know or contribute, feel free to email me. Until then, dream of summits and GET FIT! "Nature for man is only truly manifest where danger, challenge and exposure have not been shut out."
|
|
Last Updated: Saturday, September 09, 2000 |
